


Good times start with grammar

by pushdragon



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky after Wakanda, Friends to Lovers, Lay/lie confusion, M/M, Minor canon divergence, Mutual Pining, coming to terms with unrequited love, grammar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 21:47:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20414818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: It’s not Bucky’s fault that the slice of Sister Teresa’s cane back in his schooldays drove the rules of grammar into his bones like vitamins as she tried to beat the mangled vowels and contrary Brooklyn phrasing out of them all.Bucky gives the youth a grammar lesson, and almost sabotages his chances with Steve in the process.





	Good times start with grammar

It’s not Bucky’s fault that the slice of Sister Teresa’s cane back in his schooldays drove the rules of grammar into his bones like vitamins as she tried to beat the mangled vowels and contrary Brooklyn phrasing out of them all. 

It’s not his fault, either, if he’s out of practice in cocktail party chit-chat and skulking on the dimly lit fringes of Tony Stark’s big event as he scopes out the room. Sure, people were social in his day, but all that "social" meant was putting on your least shabby pair of pants and drinking the same gin sours and warm Ballentine’s in a dance hall or a neighbour’s kitchen as you’d otherwise have drunk at home. And if he used to put some effort into being the best looking guy in the room, he’d only ever aspired to be a dolled-up version of himself. Before the war, you didn’t have to pretend to be a whole other person in a room full of strangers. 

"That’s the Black Widow," says an eager voice just behind him. "She’s a double agent. Trained by the Russians. You want her on your side – a guy like you, she could break your head off your neck with her thighs."

The chief drawback of skulking is that you have to share the shadows with people who have their own reasons to stick to the fringes: in this case, under-aged interlopers who probably slipped in through the well-guarded Stark Tower foyer with the help of an adult taking pity on them. He doesn’t turn, since he recognises the voice as the guy with the infuriatingly sticky web hands who nearly took him down in Leipzig, but out of the corner of his eye he clocks the two of them, the red squirt and an equally under-aged buddy with a round face and an awe-struck expression.

"And obviously you recognise Captain America," the squirt goes on. "He’s from Brooklyn. The guy in the armchair, he’s got these mechanical wings ---"

Bucky lets the commentary slip away, because when he looks at Steve there’s something faintly off-kilter about him that kicks up Bucky’s protective memories. He looks physically at ease, leaning back on the sofa, the centre of a group of friends all huddled in together. In the months since Bucky saw him last, if anything he’s got stronger, and the harried shadows have even faded from his eyes. He wears the beard so comfortably it’s hard to remember it’s new. But there’s something about his smile, as his attention flicks over to the hallway and back again. Something detached where he should be connected. It could be the occasion, the first détente between the two factions since their fallout over the Accords, but Bucky has the feeling it’s something more.

There’s a dip in the music as rumbling beats give way to something ethereal that seems like an accidental inclusion on a young, noisy playlist. The sound of conversation suddenly carries over it. 

"… giving it another shot," Natasha is saying to Clint, who’s perched on the sofa arm on her other side. "See if they can make it work this time, now that things have eased up a little. She gets back next week."

Steve says, "I read about the work she’s doing in Bangladesh. It’s pretty amazing, what she’s been able to get done with --"

"He means Pepper Potts," supplies the squirt behind him, without waiting to find out what it is she’s achieved. "He doesn’t talk about it much, Tony that is. But she’s kind of not been around lately."

Bucky has no interest in Tony Stark’s love life. He could go over there, break up their little group. But he can’t help wanting the moment that he’s being thinking about for the last three weeks and all through the flight over, driving T’Challa and Shuri crazy with his surliness, to be private. All the work he’s done on himself in Wakanda, the head shrinking and the endless medication that ground his pride and his confidence down to nothing before it gave him back anything worth hoping for, well it all seems diminished in the golden downlights and glittering views of Stark's tower. He’s less sure by the minute that Steve’s reaction will be the one he pictured through those lost months. If it all turns out to be for nothing – the sleek new robotic arm, the carefully brushed and tied hair, the new shoes that are pinching his feet – if it’s for nothing, well he doesn’t want to find that out in the middle of a crowd of curious strangers. 

But it’s got to be a quarter hour he’s been waiting, and Steve has never had less than three people around him that whole time.

Clint says, "Lucky thing for us. When he’s got Pepper around, it’s less like dealing with a one-man missile defence system."

"She is a woman with a heart of gold, Pepper," Steve adds, and grins. "I’ll say this much –"

The squirt talks over the top of him. "That’s Hawkeye, he’s the one laying on the side of the sofa--"

"—some days I've got no idea what she sees in him."

"Lying." For Bucky, in whose memory random lessons from the schoolroom he loathed had stuck around like unwanted cockroaches through the nuclear winter of what Hydra did to his mind, the correction comes absent-mindedly.

The squirt spins towards him. "For real?"

"Yes for real," Bucky insists, getting irritated. "Your really don’t know? You kids these days are out of touch."

The young man seems kind of shattered by that, far more than a little grammar error should warrant. "You’re sure though? Lying?"

"Course I’m sure." Bucky tells him, the back of his thighs stinging in memory. "It’s with you for life, what you get in a Brooklyn boys’ convent school. You can’t ever get away from it."

The squirt looks at his pal with big eyes, glances back over to the throng around Steve.

"They got every damn thing you can thing of on the internet, and this is news to you?" Bucky frowns.

He feels instantly guilty, because he’s not mad at the kid, not really. What he’s mad about is how Natasha is leaning into Steve's side, and Steve is letting her, their bodies comfortable like they've known each other for years. And sure, Bucky understands that was never his alone, except he'd kind of let himself think it was, as if he'd come back to find a place reserved for him by Steve's side, that no-one else would be allowed in.

The music kicks into something thick with bass like a foghorn, so that Bucky loses track of all the conversations. He can only watch as Sam leans in to say something to Steve that makes his face light up with laughter. Of course everyone loves Steve, now that all that unbending integrity is wrapped up in a body that personifies heroism. But there was a time when that belonged to Bucky, almost exclusively. 

It’s not Steve’s fault the way things have turned out, he reminds himself. It’s neither of their fault that Bucky’s outlived everyone else he ever cared for. If he remembers right, no matter how hard they leaned on each other, back before the war, Steve never once expected Bucky to solve a problem for him that he hadn’t thrown every ounce of strength in his own body at first. 

Bucky used to be charming once, they say. If he hasn’t got enough of himself back to channel that with confidence, he should at least be able to find someone to have a conversation with.

**

On his way to the cocktail bar, he passes Shuri coming out of a small conference room off the corridor. With her knee-length yellow dress and her hair wound in those girlish twin buns, she couldn’t look more out of her depth here.

"Anything I can help you with?" he asks.

She breaks into the mischievous grin he expected. "There’s something in the door frame. Here and here."

What she points to is a series of bolts that shouldn’t be necessary to hold the light aluminium frame in place. He activates the magnetised fingers she gave him to unscrew them one by one and drop them into her hand. Although she has a very firm view on sharing Wakandan tech with Tony Stark, given his cosy relationship with the US military-industrial estate, she certainly isn’t above a bit of curious poking about herself. 

"— it’s up to us, Ned. We can’t let it happen."

They have to step away so they can pretend to be fascinated by the black glass sculpture in the corridor, but it’s only the spider boy and his friend again. They don’t spare a glance for Bucky as they pass, talking in an urgent hush. "I don’t care who it is – we are not going let him break up Tony’s relationship. He belongs with Pepper. So you and me, we’re gonna find out what’s going on, and we’re going to fix it."

"There," Bucky says a few moments later, as she whips out her phone to photograph the tech he’s uncovered. "Do we need to be worried?"

She gives him a considering sort of hum. "Probably only for scanning." She reaches up to tweak a wire free and the faint blue glow disappears. "But just in case."

"How is your arm doing?" she asks during the slow process of putting the frame back in its place. 

"I got no complaints about the mechanics. They run like a dream."

She leans in. "No reason to hide it away in here then. You could go out there and give all these people a chance to admire my handiwork. I’m sure at least one of them would be interested."

If his hands were free, he might flex his metal fist at her for the teasing note in that. Instead he sighs and says "How about I finish covering up your little piece of industrial sabotage first. After that, we’ll see who’s interested."

**

He scans the dozen or so people standing around the cocktail bar and immediately picks the one he’s got the least chance of charming.

"You’re back," Sam says, unimpressed, as he stacks three martinis and a bowl of crackers on a tray. "Grab me some of those paper napkins will you?"

Bucky doesn’t even look where he’s gesturing. "Those all for you, big man?" he asks.

"Thanks for the reminder." Sam flags over the smartly dressed young barman. "And I’ll take a Bloody Mary. Make it virgin." 

The barman is too professional to react with more than a minuscule quirk of his eyebrow, so Bucky says it for him. "You want a tomato juice?"

"Near enough, but I’m trying to get your boy to live a little. Small steps." 

The server hunts around for tabasco.

"So Cap and Iron Man," Sam says, turning suddenly with a scrutinising look. "You know about that? He tell you?"

Something dark and dreadful feels like it’s unfolding in Bucky’s stomach. "Don’t get a lot of news in Wakanda. What’s there to know?"

Sam takes the jazzed up tomato juice and settles it on the tray. "He’s got a thing, apparently. The Cap. And that’s not what I meant by live a little, but I guess he never did do it the easy way. Last thing Stark and his ego need, if you ask me. You saying you didn’t know either? Nothing happened, when you were all chasing each other around the frozen north?"

"But Stark’s girlfriend. She’s--"

"She’s not here yet, and a lot can happen in a week if someone like Steve Rogers wants it bad enough." 

Sam’s grinning while Bucky feels like his insides are draining away. He hadn’t realised quite how hard he’d been hoping. He turns away to get those napkins, and tucks them in between two glasses.

"Thanks man," Sam says to him. "Enjoy the party. Just try not to start any international manhunts this time." He moves a few steps into the crowd, and turns back. "Hey. You look all right for an old man."

"You know why?" Bucky manages to shoot back. "Last martini I drank was in 1943. Hope those go down easy now."

He can feel the smirk fade off his face the moment Sam’s back is turned. If he hadn’t come here with an expectation, let alone a plan, there’d been hope. Months of it, feeding off itself and growing as it sustained him through the excruciating process of letting Shuri and her team rifle through memories that should have been left buried. If he’d never let himself get carried away, the obstacle he’d been wary of was that Steve had never showed any conclusive sign of leaning in that direction. He hadn’t thought the barrier was Tony Stark, who’s everything Bucky isn’t. 

He pours himself a slug from the nearest bottle and wanders through the dimly lit room. Tony’s slick, a born salesman, whereas Bucky can‘t seem to locate his old ease in himself. He’s emotionally unavailable where Bucky would be steadfast to the point of clinginess if there hadn’t been an ocean between them. Finding himself in the lobby, Bucky looks at the two elevators with no call button in sight. Tony wears modern technology as his second skin, while Bucky feels out of date, inside and out.

Yeah, there had been hope in his heart when he got on that plane, with his vibranium plated arm and his head feeling almost as shiny new. He’d come here with one thought. If there was any chance, he was going to know it the moment Steve looked at him. 

"Ground floor," he repeats, but the elevator keeps on ignoring him. "Hey!"

A couple of women laugh somewhere behind him. There had never been a chance, because Steve’s heart belongs to someone else. He digs his hand between the elevator doors and forces them open, needing all of a sudden to be somewhere private and quiet. It’s more than forty floors down, so he swings out into the elevator shaft, fingers easily piercing the metal sheet, and starts to climb.

**

Sitting with the soft vibration of the plant room at his back, he’s had a good chance to plot out a new future for himself that doesn’t involve Steve quite so centrally, by the time the door to the roof swings open.

"Is this where it’s at, Buck? You out to watch the stars like we used to do from the end of the piers back at home?"

Steve’s expression is unreadable with the light from the stairwell behind him. He lets the door swing closed and comes over, pauses, then crouches by Bucky’s side in the dark. For a moment it’s just the two of them and the low clouds tinged with big city neon, the black bulk of the helicopter at rest over on the landing pad. Bucky tilts his head back, but you can’t see stars from here, not really. 

"Tony says thanks for finding the holes in his security."

"That what he said?"

"It's what he meant," Steve adjusts. "When you take out the curse words." 

After the laughter, it falls quiet. Steve’s solid, patient presence beside him is a familiar constant. A memory shakes loose from the tangled knot in his head. Crouched against the shell of a bombed out tank, the two of them, couple of hours before dawn, in the adrenalin charged silence before a raid. Cold enough he could see Steve’s breath even in the faint moonlight, thinking how that momentary cloud was the difference between life and the alternative. That was the time the rumour of munitions shortages turned out to be wrong, and he spend the grey morning picking snipers out of the windows with terrified sweat running into his eyes while Steve took bullets to the thigh and shoulder as he ran blithely through the unsheltered courtyard to lay the charges, and then had the nerve to frown at Bucky’s haggard face afterwards and ask if he’d been hit somewhere. But that was decades ago, and Steve’s been getting by without him for years now. 

"Okay, so this is not how I thought this moment might go," Steve says with a rueful glance Bucky’s way. "I guess you still know how to take me by surprise." 

Numb with unwanted surprises already, Bucky can only manage a fading, unresponsive grin.

"I didn’t want to ask too much by inviting you here. But the word from Wakanda was all good, and you deserve to be part of this." Steve’s voice goes a bit absent with remembering. "Tony was against it."

As is if Stark might be part of all his decisions now, a confidant for the time being and on the way to becoming more. Slotting his way so smoothly into that place by Steve’s side that had used to be Bucky’s. 

"Well, if you can’t trust a Stark’s judgment when it comes to risks," he says tightly, "who can you trust?"

"Yeah," Steve just laughs. "Okay. There’s that. And when he gets it wrong, it’s people he’s wrong about, most of the time. But I’ve gotta have faith that he can change. That’s the whole point of this, isn’t it?"

He looks at Steve’s hand between them, upturned with his fingers loosely curled, and can’t help remembering the sureness of it pulling him up from the floor of that Siberian base when the arc reactor core had all but finished him off. He’s thought of that grip a lot of times, and wondered what it might feel like if he was entitled to reach out for it. But that belongs to someone else now, the steadiness of him, the unflinching commitment. 

Bucky’s chest actually tightens at the thought of Steve having to force himself to find the good in Stark, and how determined he is to let all those narcissistic flaws get under his guard.

"You’ve got so much faith in people, Steve. You make it too easy sometimes."

Steve breathes out gently beside him, taking his time. "I know it seems that way now. But you can't lock everyone out. You'll see that. I guess that’s another thing I’ve gotta have faith in." 

Bucky knew before he opened his mouth that Steve would have an answer for everything about Stark, just like he always did about going off to get himself shot to pieces in Europe. He tries again. 

"There was no-one like you for seeing people clear. You could always tell when someone had a mean spirit under a friendly face, and you never had to look at the stars on a man’s badge to judge how he’d hold up under a Luftwaffe raid. Don’t lose that, is all I’m saying. You gotta judge a man’s character by what he’s done, not how he makes himself seem." 

"Yeah Buck. That’s what I’m doing. Do you really think I’d lose perspective after all these years?"

Steve stiffens beside him, sounding hurt, but maybe Bucky needs to hurt him, this one time.

"You deserve someone who can put you first. Not make you part of their own issues." 

After a pause, Steve goes on quietly. "Is this your way of telling me I shouldn’t get my hopes up?"

"I don’t know, Steve. It’s not really something I really wanna think about a lot."

The silence goes on for a while, but it’s turned uneasy. 

"Right." Steve says eventually. He pulls something from his pocket and deposits it in Bucky’s hand. "Right. Here. Use this. When you’re ready to come down."

It’s a thin security bracelet that will presumably allow him to get around without doing any more damage to the building services.

Steve pauses and turns in the light from the stairwell. "I thought things might be different now. I thought they might have changed more. Since we found you."

That’s the difference between them. Steve makes excuses for pressure and emotion; he thinks that Stark was not himself when he tore that base apart trying to put his fist through Bucky’s skull, that there’s a better man underneath somewhere. Because he’s Steve, he can’t see how that day was a test of himself, too, and how the goodness in him only got harder and brighter and more determined as disaster closed in on them. Because he’s Steve, he thinks that everyone has that same goodness in their heart, if only they learn how to find it. Only Bucky, who spent decades under the control of men who had Stark’s whiff of mental superiority, can tell him how completely unfit a match it would be.

"Things change all the time. People don't change though. Not as much as you give them credit for."

The door has barely closed when he regrets it, every word. 

"That's on them, Steve," he says softly, sitting alone in the dark with a victory he never wanted. "Not you."

The quiet on the rooftop gives him all the time in the world to reflect on where he went wrong. Where he starts is with the realisation that no-one has ever been able to change Steve’s mind, not when he’s set his heart on something. Opposition just makes him dig deeper trenches. The most Bucky can hope to do is sap his confidence and poison his optimism, so that if he ever manages to start something with Stark he’ll be doing it with less than his whole heart. And he’s going to need every scrap of resilience he has if he’s going to make that work. 

The longer he spends there, sitting alone in the judgmental darkness, the more sure he is that he has to fix this. 

**

He can’t immediately see Steve in the crowd, but Natasha’s easy enough to spot, pouring vodka into a line of shot glasses at the bar. 

"Glad you could join us," she says without turning, eying his reflection in the bottle.

She twists the lid on with a tight sense of finality.

"Where is he?" Bucky asks.

"Getting some air. Hey!" She stops him as he turns, subtly switching her grip on the bottle neck so that it transforms from utensil to potential weapon. "Go easy on him. He was pretty bruised up when I saw him and if you’re not going to do something to help with that then do us all a favour and don’t make it any worse."

He blinks at her and turns that over in his mind. "Understood."

** 

Since he can’t find Steve, he finds Stark instead, huddled in a boardroom with some bureaucratic types who Bucky doesn’t know and a mechanical weapon spinning on the table in front of them. It stops at Stark’s command, the blur of its two lethal blades becoming visible as it slows. 

"Vibranium tips," Stark tells them, "allow it to drill through any material known to science."

"That takes time, though," interjects a deep-voiced bureaucrat. "Time that, in a defensive scenario, we might not have."

"Not at nearly one thousand revolutions per second it doesn’t. Wait a moment and I’ll show you just how fast we can work."

Stark has a grin on his face when he walks out of the room. It disappears pretty quickly when Bucky shoves him up against the wall, metal fingers closing tight around his wrist to stop him triggering any of his tech. There a flash of disconnect, between the invulnerable iron menace he remembers and the human fragility of Stark’s body in front of him now, and it gives him an insight, too, into how this could be something Steve might want. 

"You listen to me," he says into Stark’s face, low. "The one man whose heart you don’t mess around with, that’s Steve. What did you say to him?"

Stark stops struggling against his grip. "Say to him? Nothing. I haven’t even--"

"Well maybe you should have said something. He takes things seriously, and that includes you these days. He’s a forever kind of guy."

"Wait. We’re talking about the same Steve Rogers, right? Guy who’s too good for anyone born since the invention of the pop-up toaster? I’m pretty sure the only thing he’s _forever_ about is the 1930s."

Bucky perseveres, thoroughly unsurprised, through the petty slurs. "If you don’t want him the same way, you tell him. You hear me? You want someone to fool around with, the world’s full of possibilities for a man like you. But not him. You don’t play games with someone like that."

Stark looks at him narrowly, in that predatory way he has, dropping the bluster to zero. "You’re telling me to lay off?"

"I’m telling you," Bucky says through his teeth, making himself relax, "to treat him right. You do that, you’ll get no trouble from me."

"Yeah? This doesn’t look like "no trouble" to me, Barnes. This looks like I invited you into my home – because he insisted on it, by the way – and you’re this close to setting off another war."

He’s right. There’s real fear beating in Stark’s wrist – the finely calibrated sensors in his arm can feel it. He drops his hold and steps back. "That’s all I got to say. I think you heard me."

Stark rubs his wrist and spares a glare for Bucky. "The only reason I’m not throwing you out on the street is – actually right now I can’t think of a single goddamn reason, Barnes. Stay out of my sight. Because if I have to get security to throw you out, they won’t be taking you down to the ground floor to do it."

He turns and walks off, but not in the same direction he’d been heading before. 

**

When Bucky finally gets sight of him, Steve’s out on the balcony. He’s not alone. Sam’s with him, and Tony Stark. There’s a few people covertly watching them through the glass, like Bucky is, but he’s pretty sure their interest is mostly political.

There’s seats out there but nobody’s sitting. Steve’s back is turned, so Bucky gets a good view of Stark’s face, kind of keenly lit up as he talks. If Bucky doesn’t know him all that well, first impressions certainly were less than kind, and nothing about him looks sincere to Bucky’s eyes, except how pleased he is with himself. 

"Well that’s something," Natasha says, appearing at his elbow. "I didn’t know if I’d ever get them in the same room together. The politics they could have worked out, sooner or later. But what he did to you, I’ve never seen Steve get as angry as that."

Outside, Sam says something that they all laugh at, and Stark caps it with something they laugh at even more. There must be something real there, to get them past all the history. Tony hits a button on his wrist and the transparent shield above the balcony rail retracts, letting the fresh air ruffle their hair. The million-dollar view over the city spreads out behind them.

Bucky should go back to his hotel, he thinks. The new shoes are making his feet ache, and every pinch reminds him what a chump he was to think that – he’s Captain America, for Christ’s sake, and Bucky’s gone from small scale shoplifting in Bucharest to living off charity in Wakanda, and the time before that is just a huge black pit of unforgivable in his mind. Did he really think a haircut and a pair of shoes was going to make him a catch for someone like Steve? 

"I expected it to take a bit more work than that to get them talk, though. I had a few tricks in mind."

"Did you?" Bucky says absently.

He can kind of see it, from this angle. The ease that Stark has – a sense of entitlement that’s blind in the way his self-made father’s never was – the complacency of someone who’s grown up with money and never been asked to justify his place in the world. Steve’s never had any truck with class, but he’s been swiped at enough times by people who did that you couldn’t blame him for wanting a part of a life that’s always been closed to him. 

The door hisses open as Sam comes in and heads towards the cocktail bar. There’s a whole lot less smiling going on all of a sudden, but Stark’s talking as much as ever. The lights have got lower, both inside and out. 

Bucky remembers Stark in that base in Siberia, bitterly saying "So was I", as if he’d wanted to be the kind of friend Steve only had room for one of. Insecurity like that, it’s got to be fed, and it’s a hungry beast. He’s going to want Steve, just to prove he can have him, and he’s going to want to keep him hooked in tight, putting a lot less of himself on the line than what he gets in return, measuring out his emotions with an investor’s eye.

Steve’s an idiot, he thinks for a moment, then backtracks. Steve’s one of the smartest guys Bucky ever knew. Not only does he walk into completely unconquerable dangers, he walks right back out of them again, bruised but holding his head high. He’s got a sixth sense for the victory that no-one else can see. With all his usual lack of self-preservation, Steve is going to dive right into this and trust himself to make it through the worst that Tony does to him. And despite all his reservations about Tony, he knows Steve, and if anyone can tough out all the vicious defensive layers on him, that's Steve. If there's a way through all that, it's going to take persistence and courage, and both the strength and the compassion to absorb all the barbs Stark shoots out and keep getting back up to let him fire them again. Look at it that way, Steve is just the man for the job. He makes better people out of everyone he touches. Doesn't Bucky know that better than anybody?

Starks’ voice must have dropped down because Steve is leaning forward. Stark wets his bottom lip in his mouth. It’s okay, Bucky thinks, and breathes out.

It's Natasha who says, "Oh no, Tony," in a wrenching kind of tone, right before he moves in. 

"It's all right," Bucky tells her. "Steve’s got this."

"No," she repeats on a sigh, as they kiss.

Bucky watches it for a few seconds, watches Stark’s hand curve around the back of Steve’s neck the way he’s thought about, before his feet turn without permission and carry him away.

"Hey—" Clint stops him in the hallway with an arm in front of his stomach. "Where did you get to? You ought to have a talk to Steve. There’s some weird behaviour going down tonight."

"Already handled," Bucky tells him, pushing past. "They’re out on the balcony. Go see for yourself if you wanna catch the show."

Even with the security band, it takes forever for the elevator to arrive, but eventually he’s inside and the doors close on a night he’s just glad to have put behind him.

**

But just as he’s exhaling his relief, there’s a mechanised chime and the doors open again to let Steve stumble in, white in the face and still holding a half-drunk tomato juice with a curl of celery.

"I thought you sorted it all out," Bucky says, perplexed.

"Can we not talk about it?" Steve shakes his head, looking unaccountably upset. "You wanna get out of here? Get a drink somewhere?"

It’s been seventy years since Peggy, Bucky thinks. You’ve got to expect some jitters. As the car descends, he’s already trying to think of how to patch this up.

"Just, you know. Friendly," Steve adds. "I hope I haven’t complicated everything so bad that we can’t even do that. Bucky?"

This is Bucky’s fault. It takes a lot to make Steve run away from something, and Bucky gave him all the reasons he could think of. 

"You know what I think? You should give it a chance." Steve slumps away from him, against the rear wall, shaking his head again. "If it’s something that could make you happy."

"I really don’t want to be having this conversation with you."

"Well I don’t see anyone else for you to have it with. I know he’s not a sure thing, Steve. But since when were you afraid to take a risk?"

The look Steve gives him is wearier than Bucky ever remembers seeing, and then he’s sliding down the wall, dumping the glass on the floor so that his hands can come up over his face.

"Steve?" he prompts, trying to keep the alarm out of his voice. 

"Even if I -- I don’t know what Tony wants from me. Sometimes I think he doesn’t even know himself."

The elevator stops. The door opens. Steve doesn’t move. "Then tell him that. Talk to him."

Steve folds his arms on his knees and looks up at him, sounding helpless and drained. "What would I say to him, Buck?"

"How you feel."

‘Yeah? And how’s that?"

The door slides closed again while Bucky thinks about it. They’re so still that the overhead lights go off, leaving just the bluish illumination from the display screen. Bucky doesn’t have to think too far from home. 

"I guess … how you wanna have his back not just when it’s easy but when it’s hard. When he doesn’t even know how much he needs you. How you feel ten feet tall every time he says your name. You tell him how he’s always in your head no matter how far apart you get. How you want to watch it forever, the way he’s always growing into himself but never really changing, just being a better version of a guy who was great to begin with. You say – I guess you say how the sound of his voice could bring you home from anyplace." 

In the long silence, Bucky closes his eyes, feeling lighter than he has in a while.

"That sounds good," Steve says quietly. "But I don’t think I want to say those things to Tony."

Steve makes an arc with his wrist band and the doors open, letting in the corridor light. 

"You’ll find your words, Steve. You got the heart for it. I know you do."

"Come and have a drink with me. Just us."

He puts out his hand and Bucky pulls him up.

**

In Steve’s room, there’s a small kit bag, neatly packed, and no sign of the shield he gave away with his title. The room must have been chosen by someone who doesn’t know him at all because there’s an enormous plush bed, a table with an untouched pile of cigar packets, a yellow silk lounge suite with a chaise longue that hasn’t been sat on at all, and pile of pencil shavings next to a glass of water on the rug by the window.

As they sit there on the rug, with most of the lights off so they can see the view, sharing the flat half-bottle of cola that was all Steve had in his fridge, Bucky feels himself sink into a level of tranquillity he hasn’t felt since he stepped on that plane, and for weeks before that too if he’s honest. Right now, he’s got everything he wanted, and more. With all the uncertainties of his extravagant hopes dispensed with, it’s just the two of them talking like they always did. 

He tells Steve about the work he’s been doing to wipe the last of Hydra’s traps from his mind. The places they’ve succeeded and the things they’re still persevering with. He talks about the times he’s been closest to giving up hope, and the little things, day by day, that kept him going. Steve listens with everything he has. You’d never know he was steeling himself to get back out there and give his heart to a man who’s almost certain to break it.

"I would have come," Steve starts to say, but wherever that thought is going, Bucky wants to cut it off before it ends up in regret.

"No. The first month it was nothing but talking. When we were finding all the control phrases and mapping out the deepest traumas to start working on. And there are – " He has to keep his eyes on the city view, nice civilised straight lines of light. "It turns out there are things you don’t have the words for. Never knew you’d need the words to describe. They rotated the technicians who sat with me to keep them safe. I didn’t want you to hear any of that." 

Steve’s sigh fills all the space around them. Then he puts his hand out, settles it over the metal wrist that’s closest to him. "I’m sorry, Buck."

With a slow shrug, Bucky repeats what Shuri’s team tell him after every session, even now. "It’s in the past. I’ve got some choices over how much power I let it have."

"Strongest guy I ever knew," Steve says, low. "Always were, always will be."

What difference does it make that they won’t be going to bed together when the night is over? Steve’s on his side, and nothing will get in the way of that, ever. This is the Steve he remembers, endlessly giving, with an unflinching loyalty too deeply ingrained for Tony Stark to mess with. 

Bucky gives him a sideways grin, "We can settle that pretty quick with an arm wrestle."

He can share this with Tony, Bucky thinks. He can be happy with what’s left of Steve’s heart after Tony takes what he needs. 

"Are you going to go back up?" he prompts, finishing off his glass. 

"I’m going to stay with you," Steve replies quickly.

"Well all right then, but I’m going back up to the party so you may as well give it another chance."

"Bucky," Steve groans as Bucky pulls him to his feet. "He’s not even serious about it. You think it’s a coincidence he wanted to make his move out on the balcony, in front of fifty feet of windows? Oh he made sure that everyone was gonna know that Captain America couldn’t turn him down."

Bucky straightens Steve’s jacket, takes the cola bottle out of his hand and puts it on the table. "So he’s not the kind of man who deserves you, just yet." The half-light is intimate enough that he can smooth Steve’s hair back from his face, let the heavy length of it run through his fingers. "But if anyone can change that, you can."

Steve just stares at him a long while, looking lost. "Okay," he says, soft.

Bucky nods and holds the door open. "Okay."

Stark’s an unknown quantity, but there’s any number of friends up there who’ll cheer Steve up. Bucky’s not the only one who’s got his back, these days. And Steve seems to be trying to meet him half way with lifting the mood. 

"You look sharp, Buck," he’s saying as they step back into the elevator. "All this talk about my romantic disasters, but look at you. New shoes, your hair all–" He gestures like there were any words to describe it other than _clean_ and _better than before_. "And you’re all ready to break hearts in that colour blue. Who’s all that for?"

The doors close. 

"Oh--"

Bucky’s going to say _oh no-one_, but his throat seizes up and refuses to let him reduce all those months of singularly focused hope to three forlorn syllables. Because even if it was misguided, even if it was all for nothing, it was still the purest and best thing he’d felt for seventy years. The answer to the question is so clear and all-consuming that he just can’t see past it to all the dozens of frivolous deflections he should have to hand. His heart’s too full of Steve tonight to diminish him with a word like "no-one".

So he looks at the floor and says in a small voice that any honest clunky electric motor powering a 1940s elevator system would have swallowed up for him, "You."

It's almost funny, he thinks in the moment of silence that follows, how he thought he needed more of Steve than this, his easy company, the sureness of his friendship. It _is_ funny, and he looks up to say so. But when their eyes meet – Steve's face, just like his heart, never hides a damn thing. When their eyes meet, what he sees there steals the words clean away, because it’s raw and it’s defenceless and it’s not for Tony Stark. Not a jot of it is for Stark. 

"Steve," he says in a croak, paralysed for a moment, and then he's moving, god above is he moving.

**

He’s dimly aware of the doors opening up to let party noise in. But his eyes are closed and he’s wrapped up tight in Steve’s arms, feet barely touching the floor, pressed right up along the front of him while they try to climb into each other’s mouths. Without breaking the kiss, Steve turns them a little, giving them some privacy with the breadth of his back. He hears a glass break that he really hopes is Stark. And then the doors are closed and they’re descending again, still tangled up in each other. 

**

On the rug by the window, Bucky’s kissing him in between promises, kissing his cheekbones, his forehead, his ready mouth, bending down to kiss the springy, coarse grain of his bearded jaw. They’re still in the same place where they tumbled down half an hour ago, Bucky’s knees braced around his thighs, both too greedy to get more than a few inches apart the whole time they’ve been here. 

"I didn’t know how to ask you," Steve is half-groaning into the side of his neck. "Couldn’t risk it. Couldn’t put pressure on you in case – what if I distracted you when you were doing so well?"

"You’re a damn fool," Bucky says, and gets lost for a good long stretch in one of those slow, lingering kisses where their mouths retreat and chase like they’d been doing this for years together. "If I thought about you any more, I would have forgot how to breathe."

It goes on like that, apologies on both sides, cut in with laughter. Bucky’s still too numb with amazement to be strategic about it. It’s enough just to be here, wrapped up in Steve, touching him at last. Maybe soon he’s going to start taking Steve’s clothes off, or just some of them, since it all seems too fast and he can’t quite forget whose rug they’re making out on. 

"Why were you pushing me towards Tony then?" Steve pulls back to say, frowning.

"I thought-" Bucky closes the distance, steals another soft taste of his mouth. "People said you wanted him. And you seemed unhappy. I thought he might be the only way to fix that."

There’s a pause, then Steve’s body shifts under him, tumbling him onto his back as Steve rolls them both and looms over him. It’s familiar, the strong, clean lines of Steve’s face and his guileless eyes all intent on him, and it’s brand new. 

"This is what happy looks like on me," he says as he bends to kiss carefully over the bristles of Bucky’s chin. "I guess, maybe - It’s been a while since anyone saw it. It was a pretty strange life, Buck, after I came out of the ice. And then the guy I care most about in the world was working through a lifetime of pain in the other side of the world and I was dealing with some pretty complicated priorities."

Kissing up Bucky’s jaw realigns Steve's body weight so that he’s pressing Bucky firmly into the rug on an angle that makes him suddenly, devastatingly aware of the erotic difference between vertical and horizontal. A half-conscious wriggle gets their thighs interlaced and that floods Bucky's lower body with urgent heat. 

"Oh," says Steve, like he hadn’t expected them to get here so fast either. His gaze skips over Bucky’s face as if trying to work out what he’s got permission for.

He traces Steve’s hairline with his fingertips, above where the worry lines come all too easily. "We’ve got time, right?" 

Steve twists in to lay frantic kisses over the heel of his hand, like the opposite was true. All this seems new and unbearably intense for Steve – he’s the one threading his fingers in Bucky’s hair and tugging gently until his neck makes an arch he can suck his way down, going roughly with his teeth and tongue like Bucky was a meal he’d been starving for. 

But for Bucky, everything feels right for the first time in forever. Their friendship was always a secluded kind of thing: they were separate in the midst of an army; a partnership even inside a team. He used to feel guilty about the urge he had to keep Steve away from the world, all for himself, because it was pure, senseless greed and there was nothing he could think of to give in return. But now … times have changed. Morality isn’t what it used to be. Bucky feels the weight of other people’s opinions so much more lightly than before, and Steve never gave them much power over him in the first place. Now he can give Steve everything, or everything he has left, and by some miracle he still can’t quite believe, that turns out to be something Steve wants.

Bucky’s laughing as he slides his hand over the back of Steve’s neck. "Steve." He strokes and squeezes and strokes again until the assault on his throat gentles, until he tucks his forehead under Bucky’s chin and falls still. "Steve," he repeats, softer. "You gotta know I’m in this for good. We got time to take it slow." 

With a deep breath, Steve pushes up on his elbows. "Anything you want, Buck."

He’s a gorgeous mess, with the careful styling mauled out of his hair and his mouth all pinked up from grazing Bucky’s whiskers, his eyes a bit glittery under that spectacular sweep of black lashes. 

Bucky’s reply comes out in a hush as he strokes his thumb down the side of that dear, familiar face. "I think I got that already."

**

"Maybe we shouldn’t have said anything." 

Peter gazes forlornly towards the far end of the room, where War Machine is speaking softly to Tony from outside a safety buffer of a few feet, while a troop of wheeled robots cleans up the wreckage from the platter, the chair and the three broken windows. 

"I’m gonna have to tell him," Peter hears himself say numbly. "He’s going to question everybody until he finds out who talked. There’s probably hidden cameras in the walls, microphones in the sushi rolls." 

"The robot arm dude started it. He said-"

"Yeah I got a feeling that’s not going to go down so well as an excuse, Ned. Does that look like a guy who wants to listen to the other side of the story right now?"

The slice of Tony’s fist through the air, jerking away from Rhodey’s touch, would be alarming even if that fist didn’t come with an iron exoskeleton ready to unfold in an instant.

"I’m never going to be an Avenger now. He’ll probably take my suit back and turn it into tin cans."

"Okay. Then we have to think of something. It wasn’t us. There was a portal to a mirror universe, and this other Spiderman came through it and –"

"I’ve got it, Ned. It’s like a tragedy. We heard Captain America telling it all to Falcon. Someone said … Bruce Banner told him that if they were ever to be together, the arc reactor could set off unstable elements in the serum. And-"

"Create a portal to a mirror universe!"

"… by ripping a hole in the space time continuum. So he knows they can’t be together, no matter how bad he wants it. He’s going to make the sacrifice, the Captain, and find someone else."

"Nailed it! He’ll deny it though. Who’s going to believe our word over Captain America?"

Across the room, Tony snatches a shot glass off a passing tray and knocks it back pretty quick. "There’s only one person who has to."

Tony glances around at the diminishing pile of debris at his feet and steps through the broken window out onto the balcony, where he leans on the balustrade with his back turned. The tension leaves the room like a spent breath, and conversations pick up hesitantly around them. 

"Okay," Ned says. "Do we go out there and tell the man a story?" Tony’s very still leaning on the rail, the sort of still that makes Peter’s hair want to stand on end. "Or just let it lay?"

"Lie," says Natasha, who could skewer an intransitive verb in seven different languages even on a better night when true love and crossed wires hadn’t just shot down her best hope of welding the Avengers back together, as she passes them on her way to the balcony. 

"All right then," says Ned. "You heard the lady. Let’s do it."

**

**Author's Note:**

> You'd think I'd have got a pedantic grammar fic like this beta'd, but I didn't. So if you find typos, please tell me so I can fix them.
> 
> For anyone confused but still reading, "he’s the one laying on the side of the sofa" and "Or just let it lay" are both technically incorrect and should be "lying" and "let it lie" respectively. It’s hard to explain without using words terms like "intransitive verb" and "gerund" that no-one has taught in English classes since Sister Teresa’s day, but [this page](http://www.grammarerrors.com/grammar/lielay/) has good examples, and [this page](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/how-to-use-lay-and-lie) provides the reassuring reminder that humans have been stuffing up lay/lie for centuries. And in any case, we might have already passed peak lay/lie confusion, at which point incorrect usage became acceptable usage and this entire story became redundant.
> 
> I'm new in this fandom so I'd love to connect with you. I'm pushdragon on Twitter and Dreamwidth, no tumblr though.


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